lessons

a few things i learned this week...

- the chicken and cappicola wrap at 7-eleven has 56% of your daily recommended fat intake. this is what happens when convenience stores try to do health food. makes you think twice about the McDonalds salad, doesn't it? just another fine example of things in the world that seem good for us, even occasionally purport to be good for us, but certainly arn't. still, really, really tasty. what a shock... something bad for me is also something i want.
- since my last post, i've discovered one of the reasons for which i cling to all possibilities, and as such often fail to get rid of the things i should. it seems i live my life as a sequence of individual events and concepts instead of lifestyles. what this means is that, if there is something destructive but entertaining in my life, and something good comes along to challenge it, i don't change, i just shelve the bad thing for a while. that way, if the good thing doesn't work out, then i'll have the bad one to which to return, and it won't matter at that point because i've lost the alternative to it. i'm never going to change if i keep that up. it's like i'm walking around eating a sandwich and keeping a pack of smokes in my back pocket, convinced that if i drop the sandwich and it becomes inedible, i'll at least have the comfort of the cigarettes. but life isn't just about that one sandwich, it's about cultivating a lifestyle, it's about learning that no matter how many sandwiches i drop, i should keep shopping at the deli, instead of the smokeshop, and then, when the moment of failure or weakness comes, the temptation isn't there to readdict me to it. that will take some thought, some change, some dedication, a lot of things that i either don't think i have, don't typically invest, or wonder if i'm capable of sustaining. but thus begins the trek toward a life that has merit.
- plans are good. plans make life happen. a lot of the time, i just go with the flow, or spontaneously decide things without conscious reason. this also makes nothing change. the first step is to have desire. i have about a million of those. that's about as far as it ever goes, however. i jump right from desire to unfulfillment, somehow or other entirely skipping the process of making a plan whereby i might actually achieve my goal. so that's this week's mission... or this month's... or this year's... to get down, on paper, what exactly my plan is, and then actually set forth to make it happen... no matter how it goes, it has to be better than all of this wasted abject hope. it would be nice to put hope in something realistic and tangible, just once, for a change of pace.
- i may have to more or less give up the internet... it seems that often, i find myself chatting with the wrong kinds of people... and when i get of the net a few hours later, find that i have the worst headache. by contrast, the other night, i spent a couple hours chatting to my girlfriend on msn, and when i got off, i felt great. i don't know if the other people are poison or if she's an antidote, but i think maybe both are a little true, and i should include this new knowledge in future decisions.
- i'm very, very tired of hating myself for the things that are in me... the other day i was thinking about lines, blurring... whether or not there is a point where dark grey and light black are equally satisfied, where someone can take a small measure of pride in the progress they've made without shooting themselves over all the things they have yet to fix. i'm looking for it, and when i find it, i will be that much closer to the balance that i seek and crave.

that's all for now. more later, as i keep learning. wish me luck.